Noises off: Oi, sponsors, leave our stage alone

Today's funders ask: 'How can you help us to deliver our vision?' Someone ought to tell them: 'Surely it's the other way round'

Sarah Kane's Psychosis performed at the 2008 Edinburgh festival. Kane is one of the 'in-yer-face' playwrights who have become the model for contemporary new writing. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

It's been more than half a century since the Lord Chamberlain lost his right of veto over the theatre, but, says Forced Entertainment's artistic director Tim Etchells, that doesn't mean we've got total freedom of speech on stage. Earlier this week, Etchells posted his opening address to the International Student Drama festival on his blog. In it, he speaks "of the importance of the space we do have in the arts and of the limits we do have on that space". He argues that, given this government's cuts to arts funding and its advocacy of philanthropy, "little by little, sponsors help to define the shape of public institutions, [and] even public money is more and more focused through instrumentalist agendas, more and more focused on the delivery through arts of quantifiable outcomes."

Etchells ardently – and rightly – believes in the primacy of the artist, that the art that gets made should be fundamentally their choice. He continues: "There has been a turn in the Arts Council application process in which they are asking 'How can you help us to deliver our vision?' – and that still shocks me, because, I always thought and still believe for very good reason, that it was, is and should be, the other way around."

Meanwhile, art and activism organisation Platform has blogged about Mark Rylance's dilemma around performing at the Olympic opening ceremony, given that sponsors include BP and McDonald's. The actor told the Today programme that he "had thought since agreeing that maybe I shouldn't be doing this." However, Platform concludes that it's something just to raise the concern: "Just because you might be exhibited in the Tate doesn't mean you lose the right to have an opinion on the way that oil companies operate or whether or not art galleries should be taking their cash."

Back to subsidy: at Exeunt, playwright Fin Kennedy considers the impact of the increased funding for new writing in terms of the development culture it spawned. Responding to Alex Chisholm's recent essay The End of New Writing?, Kennedy looks back to the Royal Court under Stephen Daldry in the mid-90s, when work by DV8, Conor McPherson, Neil Bartlett and the People Show, among others, sat side by side. However, the period is mostly remembered for the so-called in-yer-face playwrights who have, he argues, become the model for contemporary new writing. Today, says Kennedy, thanks to a development culture that functions in a feedback loop, new writing suffers from homogeneity. "Too often," he writes, "I've seen theatres produce new plays which may have had some promise or moments of flair but overall barely contain a single new idea or technique." The question then is what need is there for censorship in a production-line playwriting culture?